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Have you ever lost your writing document?

I backup my writing ALL. THE. TIME. I'm completely paranoid that the evil hard drive demons are going to eat my story and I'll go to pull it up and it won't be there. So for backup, I have a thumb drive, an external hard drive, and I email myself copies frequently. I don't want to lose my story.

I think the paranoia stems back to an experience I had when I was eleven. Back then, I wrote my stories in notebooks with pictures of unicorns or kittens on the cover. I was in sixth grade, and sixth graders (being oh-so-responsible) got to work in the school store during lunch if they wanted. I thought it was awesome. I got to be all professional and sell pencils, erasers, and candy to other kids for 25 cents.

And I got to work on my story when nobody came in.

But I didn't work in the school store alone. There were always two of us, and one day the boy I was working with STOLE my story. Okay, so I'm still not entirely sure of this. But I ran an errand to a teacher, and when I came back, the boy was gone and so was my notebook. I was in a complete panic. I tore apart the store, and cried when I got home. How could he be so mean?

Two days later, when I was working with the same boy again, I showed up to find my story notebook sitting in plain sight. The boy didn't even look at me, but I gathered the story gratefully in my arms and didn't put it down the rest of the day.

I like to think he started reading the story while I was out of the room and loved it so much he had to take it home to finish it. Most likely it was just a prank. But after that, I started writing on the computer and backing up everything on floppy disks.

So, my friends, have you ever lost your story to hard drive demons or mean sixth-grade boys? Did you get it back? How do you backup your own writing?

I e-mail myself a lot, too. I've never had a story stolen, but I did let a boy read a novel I'd written, and then he read the one-and-only kissing scene to some other boys (not to make fun of me; he liked the book). Almost died of embarrassment.

In college, I spent a ton of time in my boyfriend's (now hubby) room so I borrowed his USB drive for homework assignments and stories. He never used it! But he wanted to have it back before one weekend, so I gave it to him. He went out golfing that weekend. With the key in his pocket. Yeah, not smart. I lost 20k on a story and 6 one-liners about a 6 different story ideas for a PI character. I still get upset when I think about it and it's been 6 years.

I nearly lost everything I had ever written at an airport terminal once. Talk about freaking out. Thankfully someone found my bag and turned it in. Then the USB was invented and calmed my losing-my-story paranoia for good. I also back-up often. And I burn everything to a CD annually.

I've lost physical notes of stories before, but fortunately have never had electronic/hardware failure. (Though, now that I've written that, I must go back up everything because it's bound to happen now.) I really must be more conscientious about backing up everything, though!

Oh man, I would have been devastated! You held it together better than I did, I would've been tattlin' so fast, hehe.

I almost lost my current WIP a few months ago. Just before my laptop broke I e-mailed myself a copy so that I could work on my iPad while I was meeting someone for coffee. A few days later, my computer's video card was fried! Since then I've been backing up my WIP.

Love your story and totally understand the notebook--mine had kitties on it.

I've been a fervant advocate of backing up your work. I have a few CDs of early versions and started using flash/thumb drives for everything now. I save everything on two, rotate them out monthly with ones kept in a fire box at home and a lock box in a credit union in an adjoining city. I also have all my music and hundreds of family photos saved on drives in the boxes too.

I lost a whole section of a scene once. It really stunk because it was the first coherent words I had written after a looong bout with writers block. Now I pay for online backup service. If my laptop gets stolen or the house is hit by a tornado, my work will be ready for me to download to a new machine.

WELL let's see. I have 2 flash drives. I send it to my email constantly and put it in a folder. I save every two pages I write. I lost my work once and it was terrible...but luckily I was able to recover most of it because I sent the rough draft to one of my aunts.:)

I honestly find your story really cute. I really believe that the boy was really curious about what you were always writing in your notebook. Maybe he thought it was a diary or something. Lol. ;)

I do a command save every minute, and have done for years after having lost some files or parts of files when I was very young. I lost some entire files years ago, and was so upset over losing the first 100+ pages of Part I of a book that I didn't get back to it and start all over from memory till last November, 16.5 years after I lost the file. A few months ago those 100+ pages were miraculously resurrected when I tried to see if they wouldn't open with TextEdit when I had that disk in my external disk drive. Thank God I started over and finished the book before learning those pages weren't forever lost, since the beginning of the first draft was littered with purple prose and lots of other things that embarrassed me!

I learnt a lesson from that to always break my work up into chapter files, or at least normal-sized files if it weren't a book with chapters. I still handwrite some of the first drafts of my books, since I know at least they'll be safe from hard drive crashes and disk bugs.